


Through the Wreaths of Mist

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Tomorrow Series - John Marsden
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-25
Updated: 2006-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:40:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1639415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Robyn says good-bye to Chris.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through the Wreaths of Mist

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Archivist12

 

 

When they get back from burying Chris, the ones who are left don't say much to each other at all. Robyn, slipping alone into her tent, feels as if the last speech she had left in her has been wrung out by the attempt to say a fitting prayer for the life that was lost. The life they've all lost. She feels as if she'll never get the smell of him out of her nostrils, never forget the cold stiffness of his limbs as she wrapped him in a blanket.

Ellie has always seemed to understand Chris; maybe because they are both writers. To Robyn he was utterly foreign, and she hated to admit it, because she believes human beings are better than that, better than their differences, better than misunderstandings and divisions. But Chris in his better moods was still withdrawn and unresponsive, and in the worse times, the blackness of his mood directly confronted her faith with a nihilism and despair that was wholly alien to Robyn.

She last spoke to Chris alone on the night before they all left, the night before Harvey's Heroes. It was chance that brought them together, because neither was in the habit of seeking out the other's company. Robyn, for whom sleep had been elusive for weeks that felt like an infinity, had grown claustrophobic in the tent and so she rose quietly and sidled out into the open air, feeling the crisp cool descend upon her, and the moonlight pool around her, ephemeral, like grace.

The stream sparkled a bit as she approached it, and she was so preoccupied that she nearly didn't hear the light scraping until she was almost upon Chris.

He was sitting on a tree trunk, whittling away with a pocket-knife at a lump of wood that was, as yet, only half-formed. Robyn said hello quickly, so that he wouldn't be frightened, and Chris looked up at her with an oddly wide-eyed gaze. His answering "hello" came in a thick monotone, like someone who'd been asleep.

Back before the war, people got drunk and got wild. But Chris, he got drunk and became even more withdrawn, even harder to reach. It was a sinister side to alcohol she hadn't seen much of in her lifetime. She thought he used his drinking as a shield against the unfaceable parts of their lives, as she had often thought before - but tonight in the forgiving darkness she dared for the first time to ask herself whether she used her God to strengthen her to face things, or to shield her against having to. Was there a difference? Could anyone look war in the face without a helping force, and not simply break down?

"What are you making?" she said. All she could see was a lump of wood out of which two legs were emerging, both delicate, with hooves. "A horse?"

"Unicorn," he mumbled.

She felt oddly touched by that. It seemed unusually childish for Chris, fanciful; he was preoccupied, had been even before the war, with blood and darkness and death. What did unicorns have to do with their life now; what, for that matter, did they have to do with someone like Chris? For several minutes she watched him carve. He had deft hands, had Chris, with the same grubby fingernails they all had, but with an odd grace that didn't reflect the rest of him. They seemed made to be holding works of art, and as he worked she could see the graceful torso and tail of the unicorn emerge from the wood. He was saving the head for last.

"Will you be lonely when we're gone?" she asked.

He grunted sarcastically, "I reckon I'll survive."

Stung, she turned away and was about to leave, until she accidentally kicked something made of glass that had been by her feet. It fell over and gurgled as liquid spilled out of it, and Robyn caught a strong whiff of the scent of alcohol. "What's that?" she cried automatically, before she could stop herself. So this was why he sounded so odd tonight.

"Nothing," Chris said, kicking the bottle away.

"Ellie said the beer was all gone days ago."

"Leave it alone, Robyn." She knew how he felt. There was a lot lately that no-one talked about, because silence was the only way to keep terrible things vague and bearable.

She knelt down next to the tree stump where he was sitting, avoiding the puddle of beer. They had given Chris too much silence now, too much space. "Are you okay, Chris? Honestly?"

"Of course," he said. "Would be better if people weren't all over me all the bloody time. I just found that one bottle, it was no big thing, a coincidence. I like being alone. I like--" He stopped himself.

"Drinking?" she said.

"So what if I do?"

She paused and tried to say what she wanted to say without judging him. "You make beautiful art, Chris," she said. "You make beautiful art, but the world isn't beautiful to you, is it?"

"Nuh," he said. "Not really. Maybe you like to think that there's a reason for what you all are doing, or that after it's all over there is something good waiting for you at the other side. You're big into God, aren't you, but I haven't any illusions about that. You didn't see Ellie shoot that soldier in Buttercup Lane. You don't see his guts and intestines spilling out every time you wake up in the night. That's how we'll all die, though, because this thing is bigger and worse than any of you want to admit."

She'd never heard him talk so much at once. "I have doubts, you know. I don't just walk around thinking how sure I am that there's a Heaven waiting for me. But I try to have faith, anyway."

He looked up at her. "Well, I don't have any."

Suddenly he got up, and, open-mouthed, Robyn watched as he chucked his half-finished creation in the creek. It sailed in a perfect arc and landed in the creek. "Futile," he muttered, before stalking away, and in the chaos of their preparations to go the next morning Robyn ended up not exchanging words with him at all.

Anyone else, Robyn reckons, would have said "useless." She thinks of that word, _futile_ , whenever she thinks of Chris, Chris and the poems he wrote, the little pieces he carved, the scrabbling of his consciousness to find meaning in the darkness of a world without God. She can't believe that was the last conversation they ever had.

Her faith is tested more on this day than it ever has before, as she stumbles into her tent and almost immediately curls up in her bed, crying desperately again, feeling as if she is too small to contain her grief and disgust. None of them could have saved Chris, and she is too shaken to believe even that God could.

"Please," she murmurs, and it's the only word she can form through her racking sobs. "Oh, please, take it away." She has never prayed in quite this way before, and never believed so little in the possibility of an answer.

But it doesn't go away, and she feels as if it never will, as if the weight of that dead body will be upon her forever, as if the world will always be as ugly to her as it must have seemed to Chris as he lay there waiting to die. When, after minutes upon minutes wrestling with her emotions, she is too spent to cry anymore, she turns her pillow over so that the hot wet spot will not be against her face.

Only then, as she lifts the pillow, does she see it. She can hardly believe it but there's a tiny wood carving lying underneath, one that she might easily have missed night after night had she never picked the stupid pillow up. One that she's been missing every night, she realizes, since they got back from Harvey's Heroes.

She picks it up and squints and turns the thing over and over in her palm, using her hands as well as her eyes to make out the shape of what Chris left for her, until she distinguishes the shape of feathered wings and a dainty halo and realizes that it is an angel.

 

 

 


End file.
